This notebook was put together by [Jake Vanderplas](http://www.vanderplas.com) for PyCon 2015. Source and license info is on [GitHub](https://github.com/jakevdp/sklearn_pycon2015/).

An Introduction to scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python

Goals of this Tutorial

Introduce the basics of Machine Learning, and some skills useful in practice.
Introduce the syntax of scikit-learn, so that you can make use of the rich toolset available.

Schedule:

Outline:

9:00 - 9:15 Preliminaries: Setup & introduction

Making sure your computer is set-up

9:15 - 10:00 Basic Principles of Machine Learning and the Scikit-learn Interface

What is Machine Learning?
Machine learning data layout
Supervised Learning
- Classification
- Regression
- Measuring performance
Unsupervised Learning
- Clustering
- Dimensionality Reduction
- Density Estimation
Evaluation of Learning Models
Choosing the right algorithm for your dataset

10:00 - 10:45 Supervised learning in-depth

Support Vector Machines
Decision Trees and Random Forests

10:45 - 11:00: break

11:00 - 11:45 Unsupervised learning in-depth

Dimensionality Reduction: Principal Component Analysis
Clustering: K Means
Density Estimation: Gaussian Mixture Models
Application: image color compression

11:45 - 12:20 Validation and Model Selection

Overfitting, Underfitting, bias, and variance
Improving your fit: validation curves and learning curves
Application: facial recognition

Preliminaries

This tutorial requires the following packages:

Python version 2.6-2.7 or 3.3-3.4
numpy version 1.5 or later: http://www.numpy.org/
scipy version 0.10 or later: http://www.scipy.org/
matplotlib version 1.3 or later: http://matplotlib.org/
scikit-learn version 0.14 or later: http://scikit-learn.org
ipython version 2.0 or later, with notebook support: http://ipython.org
seaborn: version 0.5 or later, used mainly for plot styling

The easiest way to get these is to use the conda environment manager. I suggest downloading and installing miniconda.

The following command will install all required packages:

$ conda install numpy scipy matplotlib scikit-learn ipython-notebook

Alternatively, you can download and install the (very large) Anaconda software distribution, found at https://store.continuum.io/.

Checking your installation

You can run the following code to check the versions of the packages on your system:

(in IPython notebook, press shift and return together to execute the contents of a cell)



In [1]:

    
from __future__ import print_function

import IPython
print('IPython:', IPython.__version__)

import numpy
print('numpy:', numpy.__version__)

import scipy
print('scipy:', scipy.__version__)

import matplotlib
print('matplotlib:', matplotlib.__version__)

import sklearn
print('scikit-learn:', sklearn.__version__)

import seaborn
print('seaborn', seaborn.__version__)









    



IPython: 2.4.1
numpy: 1.9.2
scipy: 0.15.1
matplotlib: 1.4.3
scikit-learn: 0.15.2
seaborn 0.5.1

Useful Resources

scikit-learn: http://scikit-learn.org (see especially the narrative documentation)
matplotlib: http://matplotlib.org (see especially the gallery section)
IPython: http://ipython.org (also check out http://nbviewer.ipython.org)